Warhammer Quest Is Coming To PC And I Must Write This

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So many clauses of an RPS employment contract are written in blood that, honestly, you start skipping past them once you realised they’re mostly harmless blood curses compelling one to e.g. substitute in “foot-to-ball” any time I try to write “foot-to-ball”.

Those reams of sticky vellum must surely also contain something about Games Workshop games, as here I am writing about Warhammer Quest coming to PC in January, even though it’s a port of a mobile game from 2013. Well, the blood curses are making me, and the fact that a quick look finds folks saying good things about the mobile version, aside from its microtransaction-o-rama.

Based on Games Workshop’s multiplayer board game from 1995, Warhammer Quest is a singleplayer turn-based dungeon crawler. There are procedurally-generated dungeons filled with monsters and loot so you kill the monsters to get the loot, and killing monsters makes you better at killing monsters, which means you can fight nastier monsters.

These monsters include Skaven – a fact I imagine a clause inserted by Kieron compels me to state.

It’ll arrive on January 7th, 2015 for Windows, Mac, and Linux on Steam. It’ll cost £10.99 but have microtransactions selling new heroes to play as, extra weapons to wield, and skellingtons and necromancers to fight. A ‘Deluxe’ version with all those included will run you £19.99. It’s a shame those shenanigans are carrying over to PC, but I suppose it’s faithful to the tabletop game and its addon packs. Gentle urging to buy more is part of the core Games Workshop experience.

Not having an iThing, I’ve never played Warhammer Quest myself. How is it, gang?

20 Comments

Good, but fairly simple, streamlined to the point of not telling you what particular options do or what stats mean, etc., and heavily, heavily dependant on luck. I liked it quite a bit, and the microtransactions for everything bar the extra campaign(s) really are optional (EDIT: And you can get quite a bit of playtime out of just the base campaign), but even if it was redone in CryEngine 3 or something I don’t think I’d recommend paying that much for it.

I played a lot of this on iPad when it first came out, then went back to it again as the expansions were released. A great game for whiling away a bit of time when I was on the move, in an airport, or on a boring conference call, but I’m less sure how that’ll translate into a PC game because it was so very streamlined on the iPad.

Pocket Tactics gave the original game a 4/5 in their original review, and named it their RPG of the year in 2013. So it’s good on a mobile device, but I’m yet to be convinced to put down about twice as much to get the game I already own on iPad on PC.

Really slickly put together, and the tactical combat is a lot of fun if a bit on the easy side.

It suffers from board-game-itis though, with random dice-rolling being more of a frustration that it really should be. Random skill progression means that casters may never get the more interesting spells (in one campaign my mage recieved 3 different healing spells before getting an upgrade to the basic attack spell). There are also random events in towns that pretty much all result in “minus X gold/attribute” that can trigger on each screen… so visiting the market multiple times or checking to see how much gold it takes to level a character can result in an arbitrary punishment.

Those are just minor complaints for an otherwise good game, but taking the price and the rather short campaign into account, I would recommend waiting until it goes on sale.

It is a bit daft, and I do wish if you were willing to spend £15 on the PC version it came with a key to use on the ipad/android device as well but this is a complaint I have about Pandemic as well, not just GW.

I think the base PC version has for its £11 the base game from iOS, the Zombies and Vampires Enemies Pack, the Zombies and Vampires Tileset Pack, and the two expansions. This comes to I believe £3 + £2 + £2 + £3 + £3, so the value is not bad. The deluxe edition includes the 7 extra warriors, which on iOS are £2 each, but you probably wouldn’t want to buy all of them. So, the price is comparable: you get things a little cheaper on PC even pre-sales, but you don’t have as much control over exactly how much you buy as on the mobile app.

That softened the blow, so I dug a little deeper, and found the microtransaction store. Microtransactions in a single player PC game? It doesn’t matter if they’re optional, there is a clear, and constantly present, icon for the real money store that exists right next to the fake money store. That’s even more disgusting than I originally thought. I can understand f2p games with microtransaction stores, but charging for the base game and having a store just reeks of greed and intentional abuse of wallets.

Cool, another long ago murdered by GW winds its way onto PC, and one I’ll happily say *fap fap fap* to. I’m loving this spate of old GW games, means I’m no longer sad to find 40k and WFB generic piles of shit with dodgy rules and increasingly awful models.

If this is just a straight port of the ipad game though it probably won’t be as good as it could be, certainly not compared to the already excellent Mordheim which is really playing to the PC’s strengths.

I’d certainly hope for extra love for the none-dungeon based shenanigans in any Warhammer Quest game because thats where the game really shined, you went in as a party, killed your monsters then rolled dice to travel back to town and sell your wares where seemingly anything could happen.

If you have played Warhammer Quest the game is good and easy to understand. If you haven’t played Warhammer Quest then the game’s dislike of giving you specific rules details will likely be irritating. It’s a good game for mobile, I think. I’m not sure about PC. I mean, if you don’t have another device that can run the game then sure, go for it, it’ll be fun. But it’s the sort of game that you are more likely to play on the bus rather than sit down in front of a computer.

If you’re the sort of person who gets upset when they get dice-screwed to death then you’d probably be better off avoiding it. The fate of every adventurer is to die thanks to a streak of nasty random encounters. Still, even on Hardcore, if your party gets wiped then you get to keep every non-equipped item in your inventory, so as long as you don’t sell all your loot, the next party will have a nice start.

This looks like a replica of Arcane Quest and Mighty Dungeon (both on Google Play), which are digital replicas of Hero Quest. So, I guess this would be a third generation of such a game with updated graphics and a larger budget. Interesting to those who love the WH40K universe, perhaps even some who don’t. But I would check the other two games if Hero Quest is your bag and you have an Android device (or perhaps iOS, too. I don’t know because I don’t use that system).

Actually, I’d buy a lot of the old simpler Warhammer games if they came out on android. I don’t get why so many developers still bring out games only on iOS.

I’ll check out the clones mentioned by Shardz above, but half the fun comes from the familiar warhammer world and the nostalgia, which the clones won’t have.
I wish there was a decent LOW TECH version of space hulk available as well. The version that they made in parallel with the PC version is too complex graphically for a small screen and my slow phone. Again, there is a nice clone, but it’s not quite the same.

*depending on how evil the microtransactions are. I don’t mind the option of paying for new campaigns or optional players, but I refuse to play any game that pesters me or locks away basic content.

I *love* this game on the ipad. But I wouldn’t recommend it as a PC game. (I have much lower standards for mobile games than PC games, which seems reasonable to me.)

I found the turn-based combat excellent fun, it looks pretty and there is undeniable draw in levelling up your characters and finding new equipment. But it does get repetitive, and its annoying to find equipment for DLC characters you haven’t bought yet.

My main issue with the game is that at higher levels (4 or 5) is costs a vast amount of gold to advance to the next level (this is how levelling up works, you have to pay for training). I assume this is faithful to the boardgame, but the amount of gold you have means you have to grind levels in order to keep levelling up, which is not fun.

Easily one of my biggest disappointment in mobile games. Bought it on launch day, and after an few dungeons never touched it again.

It strips away all tactical or interesting decisions by obscuring all the stats and numbers, which are critical to understanding the game’s systems. In the board game you have all the information right there at your disposal, so you can actually make choices that are informed by the game’s mechanics.
In this it’s all just a big question mark.

My warrior gets an ability that increases his defense. Great, by how much? “No idea.”
Ok, my mage has a chance every turn to recover some mana. What’s the chance, what are my odds? “We’re not telling you.”
What are the chances to hit? to block? Does being closer or further with my archer affect anything?

All mysteries that the game doesn’t want you to figure out, which renders any possible planning or tactics just random guesswork.